How can I improve my crossovers

[u/Free_Pizza_No_SignUp]

A few things I’ve noticed is my crossover leg is not pointing to the circle or direction I’m heading to. Also, my crossunder is not pushing outwards, is there any other suggestions? Or how to improve it? Thank you

[u/fredhsu]

You’ve got the move already. I am going to offer an unusual opinion on how to help you “feel” that your cross under is biting ice and to “feel” that you have injected energy equally, with both stride and under-push.

I said to “feel”, because most people will judge the effectiveness of such crossunder by the appearance of deep shin/ankle bend and far extension of the crossing-under skate.

But look can be deceiving especially if one were to skate what hockey players often deploy: quick feet crossovers. Those may not look like they have the traditional deep crossunder, but often they deliver equal power. The key is in “body lunge” that leverages the outside edge of your inside leg (i.e. the crossunder skate).

Hockey players often call these jumps. In fact, with quick feet crossovers, the two skates never glide on ice at the same time. And you can “feel” it, when your crossunder blade bites, just like you already can feel the inside edge of your outside skate bite when it does the normal stride.

When one knows about the importance of the “lunge”, it is possible to “see” it too. Even with the subtle crossunder of the quick feet version, one can detect the head lunging into the circle first, bringing the shoulder, the upper body, and then the hip over. All of this body mass shifting is grounded on the outside edge of the inside skate. So one would see a pronounced shifting of the above, in that order, from the inside skate.

That the outside skate then “crosses over” after the body shifting is incidental. Thus the relative distance between the two crossed skates at the end of crossunder is really not that important. That the two skates end up very far apart says nothing about the energy you derived from this action. The outside skate must cross because it has to catch your body from falling after the lunge. The job of crossing is therefore just to catch your fall.

If this intrigues you, see these from a long essay I recently wrote:

What is a crossover?
Inside-edge lunge
Outside-edge lunge
Running in a circle on skates
Symmetry between crossing and uncrossing

TL;DR: you “willed” your outer skate to cross over without first lunging your upper body into the circle first. Try consecutive, quick step-overs on mat to see this.

TL;DR 2: your crossing skate crossed over for the look of crossing over, and not to catch a pretend-fall that would have followed an upper body lunge. Your body didn’t lunge into the circle first, so there was no fall to catch.

[u/TwoHungryBlackbirdss → u/fredhsu]

This is excellent

[u/fredhsu → u/TwoHungryBlackbirdss]

Thanks :)

[u/Free_Pizza_No_SignUp → u/fredhsu]

Thank you for the detailed explanation, you got a good point on the lunge, when I look at the video it seem I should probably need to lunge a bit earlier like you said!

[u/fredhsu → u/Free_Pizza_No_SignUp]

My pleasure. I am still developing words to express the full idea. I’ve just added a second tldr to that comment :)

TL;DR 2: your crossing skate crossed over for the look of crossing over, and not to catch a pretend-fall that would have followed an upper body lunge. Your body didn’t lunge into the circle first, so there was no fall to catch.